10 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. , [aNNO 1776. 



dependence, whom the flattering pens of Ovid and Horace represen as formi- 

 dable even to Augustus, and preferring death to the loss of their liberties, fa- 

 voured by the natural strength and indigence of their country, were not very 

 likely to be so far subdued by any foreign power inferior to the Roman, as to 

 suffer any considerable revolution in their customs and language : for as to the 

 irruptions of the Goths, Vandals, and Lombards, in the 5th and Qth centuries, 

 besides a profound silence in history concerning any successful attempt of those 

 barbarians on this spot, it is hardly credible, that any of them should have either 

 wished or endeavoured to settle in a country, perhaps-far less hospitable than that 

 they had just forsaken, especially after they had opened to themselves a way into 

 the fertile plains of Lombardy. 



Some stress must be laid on this inference, as the history of what befel this 

 country, after the decline of the Roman empire, is so intimately blended with 

 that of Suabia, the Tyrolese, and the lower parts of the Grisons, which are 

 known to have falleu to the share of the rising power of the Franks, that nothing 

 positive can be drawn from autliors as to the interior state of this small tract. 

 The victory gained in the year 496 near Cologn, by Clovis I. king of the 

 Franks, over the Almains, who had wrested from the Romans all their domi- 

 nions on the northern side of the Alps ; and the defeat of both Romans and 

 Goths in Italy, in the year 549, ^y the treacherous arms of Thcodebert king of 

 Austrasia, whose dominions soon after devolved to the crown of France, neces- 

 sarily gave the aspiring Merovingian race a great ascendancy over all the coun- 

 tries surrounding the Grisons ; and accordingly we find that this district also was 

 soon after, without any military effort, considered as part of the dominions of 

 the reviving western empire. But it does not appear that those monarchs ever 

 made any other use of their supremacy in these parts than, agreeable to the 

 feudal system which they introduced, to constitute dukes, carls, presidents and 

 bailiffs, over Rhaetia ; to grant out tenures on the usual feudal terms ; and con- 

 sequently to levy forces in most of their military expeditions. It must however 

 be observed, that these feudal substitutes were seldom, if ever, strangers : those 

 who are on record to the latter end of the 8th century having all been chosen 

 from among the nobility of the country. And that no foreign garrisons were 

 ever maintained for any continuance of time in these parts, appears from a cir- 

 cumstance related by their annalists ; who say, that an inroad of the Huns in 

 670, when external forces would probably have been very acceptable to the na- 

 tives, was repulsed merely by a concourse of the inhabitants. 



History continues to furnish us with i)roofs of the little connection this 

 people had with other nations in their domestic affiirs, notwithstanding their 

 dependence on a foreign power. In the year 780, the bishop of Coire, who by 

 the constitution of that see can only be a native, obtained from Charlemain, 



